Off and Chopping
Ten o'clock doesn't seem like a very early time to get up. Unless, of course, it's Sunday, and it has been raining all night, and the roads are badly iced, and your first business of the day is chopping wood for three hours. Several of us would rather have stayed in bed.
But - six members of the Wood and Weatherization Crew managed to show up anyway, and they and I were waiting on the steps of College Hail, shivering in down jackets. We were waiting for Cathy Wasserman '85 in the Tucker Foundation car that would take us to White River Junction, where there was a pile of wood in need of splitting. I was just the journalist along for the ride, but I expected to put in ray share of work along with everybody else. As we waited, I asked Julie Aires '84, a wood crew veteran, why she got involved. Community service? Exercise? Woodcutting skills? She couldn't quite decide. "I'll think it over," she laughed.
Wasserman arrived with the car, and we loaded the tools in its trunk. Two other cars stopped to warn us about the roads, which were very icy. We looked at each other. Should we give it up? Wasserman reminded us that we had had to cancel on Mrs. Thomas the week before because of a snowstorm. We decided to take our chances on the roads.
When we arrived at Mrs. Thomas' home, we unloaded the mauls and navigated over the ice to the wood pile two cords of wood in pieces too large for the stove Mrs. Thomas uses to heat part of her home. We split up into teams and got started. Everyone seemed to know exactly what to do. The longest logs were attacked with a chain saw; the ones already cut were rolled and carried to where three crew members had begun splitting; an adjoining area was shoveled off; and, as fast as it was split, the wood was meticulously stacked. Slowly, we could see our own steady progress: the log pile shrank and the split pile grew. From the doorway, Mrs. Thomas watched us, smiling.
The Dartmouth Wood and Weatherization Crew has two separate genealogies. In the fall of 1981, senior Rob Eshman '82 came up with the idea that Dartmouth students could provide a service for Upper Valley residents by chopping wood for people who owned their own wood lots but were unable to provide or pay for that labor. "Dartmouth gets a lot from the community," Eshman explained, "and it has an obligation to give back. This seemed like a good way to do it." The idea was a great one; what it required, however, was interested students.
Enter Ann Schoenfieid '85 and Cathy Wasserman 'B5. That same fall, Schoenfieid and Wasserman had organized a wood-chop on the Green during the Dartmouth Night bonfire construction. It was an attempt to show students that there was a way to put the kind of energy spent on the bonfire to work for the community, especially where wood was concerned. At Dartmouth, where a dormitory fireplace is a frill and rooms are often overheated during the winter months, it is sometimes easy to forget that many families in the area depend upon wood to survive the winter.
The wood-chop was a huge success. Logs for the event were donated by private dealers, tools were loaned, and the resulting 14 cords of split wood were donated to the Winter Home Emergency Network (W.H.E.N) in Lebanon. On their way across the Green, many students stopped for a moment to learn proper splitting techniques from Dartmouth Outing Club members and to stack wood . . . and the Wood and Weatherization Crew was off and chopping.
It works this way: prospective clients are first screened by local agencies such as W.H.E.N, and the Listen Center in Lebanon to determine whether real financial need is involved. The majority of clients own their own wood and, like Mrs. Thomas, need it chopped and split to usable size, although the crew has occasionally agreed to do other weatherization work, such as rebuilding a chimney or putting up storm windows. Screened clients are passed on to Jan Tarjan, director of community programs at the Tucker Foundation, and then to the wood crew chairperson, who contacts the client to arrange the job.
In the one brief year of the crew's existence, it has chopped over 50 cords of wood and served approximately 30 clients. Additional energy has been put into chopping wood from the College's own land to be donated to W.H.E.N. The wood crew has also managed to garner a great deal of publicity for itself and for the College. The Boston Globe, picking up a Dartmouth news release, featured the service, and the local C.B.S. station in Burlington, Vermont, ran a short television spot about it on its evening news program. Just before Christmas last year, C.B.S. national news aired a story on the crew, and a briefer version, aimed at a younger audience, appeared Christmas day on "In the News."
But this was all news to Mrs. Thomas; she seemed unaware that there were six minor celebrities in her back yard, running chainsaws and mauls through her wood. Word of the wood crew came to her through a local magazine for senior citizens. She owned enough wood, she had calculated, to last for two winters, but it was useless to her as it was. In the past; Mrs. Thomas told me, her son-in-law had chopped it for her, but he couldn't get up to White River Junction this year, and she was afraid the wood would rot. When she saw the magazine notice, Mrs. Thomas contacted the Listen Center; a few weeks later, the wood crew contacted her. "I'm retired," she said, looking out the window, "and it's wonderful for me to have it done."
And outside, the job really was getting done, but it had become clear to us that we couldn't get through all of the logs that day: there was more wood than we had expected. We decided to finish up for the morning and arrange for another visit the following week. Mrs. Thomas, seeing us start to clean up, invited us all in for coffee and cinnamon rolls before we went, and we were easily persuaded. Pulling off her soaked jacket in the hall, Wasserman remarked that this was a common gesture some crews have even been thanked with home-baked pies to take back to campus.
Because Dartmouth is such an active and colorful community in and of itself, it's easy to forget that the College is part of a larger community one which is, in general, much less affluent. As a result, many students spend four years at Dartmouth without realizing that they are living in an economically depressed area. "For some students," one crew member agreed, "the College is a refuge." Tucker Foundation efforts such as the wood crew, the big brother/big sister program for local children, and nursing home and prison visitation programs are helping to put Dartmouth energy and creativity to work for the larger community, and they are catching on. For the students involved, these activities help to put life at Dartmouth into perspective. "You both benefit from this sort of thing," Wasserman said. "The helper as well as the helpee. And the more you do it, the more you want to do it."
Difficult as it was to tear ourselves away from Mrs. Thomas' warm kitchen and cinnamon buns, the wood crew began to move out. Painfully, we got back into our wet boots and made our way across the icy ground to the car. Someone mentioned a paper she had to write by the next day. Julie Aires groaned . . . then laughed. "I just thought of why I like to do this," she said. "It gets me out of Hanover."
Mrs. Thomas's farm, locale of the wood-chopping expedition.
Time out for members of the Dartmouth wood-chopping crew. Left to right: Scott Rebhun '83, Cathy Wasserman '85, Tom Bradley '85, Katie Stearns'82, Jean Hanff Korelitz '83, Mark Engel '85, and Julie Aires '84 (kneeling).
Mark Engel '85 earned his cinnamon buns.
On college land near Happy Hill Cabin in Norwich, Dartmouth students in the fall chopped morethan ten cords of wood that was stockpiled for distribution to the needy of the region.
Kevin Peterson '82 and his chainsaw kept the choppers well supplied withstove-length wood.
Cathy Wasserman '85, co-chairman of the Wood and WeatherizationCrew, displays good chopping form.
